Comments from gamers on the shutdown notices included things like “my daughter is heartbroken” and “Please don’t remove petville. I been playing for 4 yrs. and I’M going to miss my pet Jaime.why do you want cause depression for me and others. Why do you want to kill my pet?”

For players that have invested a lot of microtransactions and/or time, this comes as a heavy blow. Most readers on/. have become used to game publishers disabling content or shutting servers down with little or no notice-- is this a further sign of things to come, or will this cause enough outrage to reverse the trend?

As a consumer you need to make a decision. Personally, if I cannot play it "offline" I do not purchase it - I've even returned games that could not be "unlocked" without playing online. Bike Race for android is a good example of this.

If most consumers made decisions like this then game makers would start to produce games that play equally well offline as online.